The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Fox Sports Interactive Acquires Sports News Blog Network Yardbarker
- Loopt Feeling Right At Home With Facebook Places, Adds Deep Integration
- Scribd Partners With Apture To Include Rich Media Contextual Browsing Within Content
- Unvarnished Raises $1.2 Million And Opens The Floodgates
- Microsoft Rolls Up Cloud Services Into Office 365, Takes Aim At Google Apps
- Socialcast ‘Reach’ Extends Activity Streams To Outside Business Applications
- Lekutian: Rakuten and Baidu Open Online Mall In China
- Custom Jewelry Startup Gemvara Gets Some Polish As Its Revenues Start To Shine
- When Steve Jobs Rants, Visualizations Of His Words Materialize
- HP Drops Palm From webOS’s Branding, Launches HP webOS 2.0
- Ooyala Launches Video Paywall Powered By PayPal
- StockTwits Grabs $4 Million More In Inside Round
- Brammo’s Newest Electric Motorcycle, The Enertia Plus, Gets 80 Miles Per Charge
- Social Commerce Startup LivingSocial Hits 10 Million Subscribers, Buys Urban Escapes
- Notorious Patent Troll NTP Locates A New Target: Yahoo
- Evernote Raises $20M In Bid To Become A “Global Platform For Human Memory”
- EchoSign Adds Social Identities To E-Signatures
- Millennial Media: Android Revenue Exceeds iPhone Ad Sales; iPad Up 316 Percent In Q3
- Consolidation In Enterprise Messaging Land As Mirapoint And Critical Path Merge
- What If Google’s Social Layer Is Chrome? What If Facebook Builds A Browser?
- Android Chief Andy Rubin Sends His First Tweet — And It’s Aimed At Steve Jobs
- Y Connect, Yet Another Doomed “Me Too” Service From Yahoo
- Twitter’s Snowflake Project To Update Tweet IDs Really Is More Like A Blizzard Now
- Apple And Google: The Activation Pissing Match Continues
- Video Calling Startup Wham! Nails $3 Million In Series A
| Fox Sports Interactive Acquires Sports News Blog Network Yardbarker Posted: 19 Oct 2010 09:13 AM PDT
Founded in 2006, Yardbarker, which has 7.5 million average monthly users, is a network of 600-plus sports blogs and 70-plus pro athlete blogs, which includes content from Donovan McNabb and a number of other well-known athletes. The site also aggregates news articles about sports, which are submitted by users and voted up in a Digg-like fashion. The deal isn’t completely surprising considering FSIM and Yardbarker already had a sales and content arrangement. Yarbarker, which has raised $8 million in funding, will join FOXSports.com, Scout.com, whatifsports.com and other sites belonging to Fox’s sports networks. Mainstream media networks seem to be picking up blog networks like candy these days. AOL recently bought (ahem) TechCrunch a few weeks ago.        
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| Loopt Feeling Right At Home With Facebook Places, Adds Deep Integration Posted: 19 Oct 2010 09:00 AM PDT
With a lot of these location startups, you check-in and you can push that check-in to Facebook. This technically checks you in to Facebook Places as well, but what it really does is create a new object for the place you’re at on the other service within Facebook’s graph. With Loopt’s new integration, you’ll check-in to a place and it will find that place on Facebook Places, and check you in there. “As far as I can tell, this will be the deepest integration yet,” founder Sam Altman tells us. “I think this is key to a unified data set and all the good things that come with that,” he continues. I agree with that. Right now, while it’s nice to see a lot of companies working with Facebook’s data to unify things a bit, it’s not true unification since all these random place objects are being created. Foursquare and Gowalla are two example of location startups doing this. On one hand, you can certainly see why — they want to keep their location graphs, which they’ve worked hard to build, intact. But on the other hand, the data is a lot less useful. This new Facebook Places integration is a part of the latest iPhone update for Loopt. In it, you’ll also be able to see all of your Facebook and Loopt friends on a map at the same time. And you’ll be able to see past check-ins to Facebook Places from within Loopt — including Facebook comments on those check-ins. All of this should be coming to the Android version short as well, Altman says.
       
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| Scribd Partners With Apture To Include Rich Media Contextual Browsing Within Content Posted: 19 Oct 2010 09:00 AM PDT
We wrote about Apture Highlights, a new plug-in that brings instantaneous search to content on the web, a few months ago. Today, Apture has scored a pretty significant deal with document-sharing site Scribd to allow users to use Apture Highlights on the tens of millions of public documents on the content platform. As we wrote in August, 'Apture Highlights’ plugs the "search leak" that is taking place with content on the web. The feature allows you to highlight any word or phrase on a page and instantly bring up search results in a window. The startup brings results from 60-plus sources including YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia, Google and more for extra context around content. Now, when users are reading documents, books, or other works on Scribd, they will be able to highlight any word, and Apture will open a small browser within the page to search for the additional information on Google, Bing or Yahoo. Scribd representative Michelle Laird says that this integration is made possible party because of the company’s move to convert the platform to HTML5, which provides a more engaging experience for users (as of July, user engagement had tripled on Scribd.) According to Laird, 50 percent of documents will be integrated with Apture today, with the remaining integrations rolled out over the next few days. For Apture, which has raised $4.1 million in funding, the deal with Scribd is a big win. This will be largest implementation of Apture to date, says the startup’s CEO Tristan Harris. Other Apture partners include The Financial Times and Reuters. http://player.vimeo.com/video/15725310?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0 Apture Highlights on Scribd from Tristan Harris on Vimeo.        
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| Unvarnished Raises $1.2 Million And Opens The Floodgates Posted: 19 Oct 2010 08:59 AM PDT
The self-described reputation management site, which allows professionals to anonymously submit reviews on their peers, has just renamed its site to “Honestly” and raised $1.2 million from several high-profile firms including First Round Capital, Ron Conway’s SV Angel, Charles River Ventures. The round also includes individual investors, like Joshua Schachter, Travis Kalanick and Richard Chen. The corporate entity is still officially named Unvarnished, but in terms of identity and brand the company will effectively go by Honestly. Beyond today’s makeover and funding announcement, founder Peter Kazanjy is officially opening the site to any professional. Previously, access to Unvarnished has been limited to invite-only or professionals from a list of roughly 200 pre-approved tech/tech-related companies. Now anyone, with a Facebook account, can set up a profile on Unvarnished or claim a preexisting profile and submit reviews. In a press release this Tuesday, the company says, “Based on the professional, honest, and nuanced review content that has been contributed by the community over the past six months, we're confident that now is the right time to take this next step.” As evidence of the community’s health, Honestly points to recent statistics: Over the last six months, the review distribution— which is numerically based on a 5-star rating system, with 5 being the top score— shows that 61% of ratings feature a 5 star rating and only 2% of ratings showcase the dreaded 1 star review. That does indicate a largely positive environment, but as I’ve written before, there is still room for the devil. For those unfamiliar with the mechanics of the site, Honestly works by allowing any user to create a profile for him/herself or a peer. Reviews are submitted anonymously, your name is never attached to a quantitative or qualitative review, however, people can rank how helpful your review is, which influences your overall trustworthy rank. It is an incentive to be fair and provide insightful reviews but it doesn’t really prevent anyone from using the site to settle personal vendettas or fabricate lies. Unless a comment violates the terms of service (i.e. illegal), users cannot remove it from their profile (nor can they take down their profile), however, they can respond with comments. When Kazanjy and I spoke in September, he noted that there has been less than 10 user complaints, that (combined with the previous stat) does imply a high level of civility. However, I still wonder whether Honestly is ready to be unleashed on the world wide web. Since March, the site’s users, which have numbered in the tens of thousands, have been frolicking in a fairly small, properly walled-off garden. Now that everyone (and their vengeful ex-boyfriend/girlfriend) has a key to the garden, it will be interesting to see how the environment changes and whether the rate of consumer complaints rise. I don’t expect a deluge of false reviews mucking up the entire Honestly community and abuses might not be obvious for quite a while. However, until Honestly allows users to opt out and remove their profiles, I will remain skeptical. As the cliche goes, it only takes a few bad apples.
       
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| Microsoft Rolls Up Cloud Services Into Office 365, Takes Aim At Google Apps Posted: 19 Oct 2010 08:21 AM PDT
Before now, Microsoft’s business-facing cloud services have been broken up in a few places: SharePoint, Lync Online, Exchange, and Office web apps. Office 365 looks to unify these. Microsoft SVP Chris Capossela says “This is everything we know about productivity brought to the cloud”. The messaging here seems to indicate that Microsoft is more directly targeting Google Apps, the suite of online products that have been increasingly encroaching on Microsoft’s enterprise market. In what may have been a jab at Google, Capossela says “We can differentiate from our competition, particularly those coming from the consumer space, by making sure our servers are far more reliable”. I’m sure Google would object to this, as it often beats its chest about the security of Google Apps. Microsoft is going to target small businesses in a way it hasn’t previously: for a business with under 25 employees, Microsoft will charge $6 per user per month; for larger companies, plans start at $2 per user per month for email alone — prices scale up to $27 per user a month, which includes telephony features (voicemail in your inbox) and video/voice conferencing. There’s also a single sign-on to access all of these services. Before now, Microsoft sold its Business Productivity Online Suite for $120/user/year; In contrast, Google Apps runs $50 per user per year, so Microsoft’s new price points are more competitive. Microsoft says that before now it could only traget around 15% of an enterprise’s budget, because it was only selling software. Now it’s also helping run their infrastructure, which expands the potential market. Office 365 is going to launch to the public in a worldwide release next year. For now, Microsoft is kicking off Office 365 with a limited beta rollout. You’ll be able to learn more at Office 365.com, which Microsoft isn’t throwing live for another three hours for reasons that I’m sure make sense to them.
       
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| Socialcast ‘Reach’ Extends Activity Streams To Outside Business Applications Posted: 19 Oct 2010 07:36 AM PDT
Socialcast combines a corporate activity stream that ties into CRM and ERP systems with social bookmarking, Outlook and SharePoint integrations, mobile (iPhone and Blackberry) and desktop (Air) apps, and analytics. Co-workers can share knowledge and updates in a semi-private setting. Socialcast's Reach allows companies to bring these conversations into applications that employees are most familiar with, like CRMs, so that they don’t have to leave their work to view contextual information from the communications platform. For example, the Reach Stream integrates key Socialcast streams into any SharePoint, Intranet or business system environment that supports html/javascript (Founder Tim Young tells me that on the backend, the integration only involved a few lines of code). The Reach Discussion extension allows users to engage in specific conversations related to customers, projects and operational metrics that live in a number of systems within another application. For example, this could involve a CRM platform where discussions surround lead opportunities or issue tracking. While, these discussions live inside Socialcast, they are visible both in the Socialcast community and the business system. Reach Recommend is creates a view into the connections of employees as they search for content across the enterprise. It’s similar in theory to “liking” an item on Facebook. Once a user clicks on a "recommend" button on any resource in the enterprise, a message is immediately inserted into the Socialcast platform, surfacing that person's recommendation. For Socialcast, which just raised $8 million in new funding, Reach hinges on the same opportunity that Facebook has developed for Facebook Connect, says Young. Reach allows Socialcast’s conversations to be leveraged within key work environments without having to distract employees with another program.        
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| Lekutian: Rakuten and Baidu Open Online Mall In China Posted: 19 Oct 2010 07:27 AM PDT
Under the deal, Rakuten holds 51% of Lekutian, with Baidu owning the rest. Much like Rakuten’s Ichiba market place in Japan (see here for our extensive case study on Rakuten), Lekutian is a B2B2C platform. Chinese merchants can set up an online shop in the online mall to sell directly to end consumers or source products from suppliers. Lekutian monetizes through collecting “virtual real estate fees” as well as commission payments from shop owners. The platform started with some 2,000 merchants in beta today, instantly making it the biggest B2B2C platform in China, according to Rakuten. In Japan, Rakuten dominates the e-commerce market with its gigantic Rakuten Ichiba online mall, currently counting 33,000 merchants and no less than 64 million members (which is half of Japan’s population). The Baidu deal in January was the first of a series of international deals the company inked in recent months. Rakuten acquired US-based Buy.com for US$250 in May and France’s Priceminister for the same sum just one month later. The launch of Lekutian follows another cross-border joint venture in the e-commerce sector between a Chinese and a Japanese company: Taobao and Yahoo Japan linked their online shopping services back in June this year.        
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| Custom Jewelry Startup Gemvara Gets Some Polish As Its Revenues Start To Shine Posted: 19 Oct 2010 07:00 AM PDT
First, some stats: Lauzon says that Gemvara, which was previously known as Paragon Lake, has grown from around 20 employees last April to 40 today, and is on pace to close the year out with 60. The average order size has been nearly $1000, and the site is now drawing 2 million page views a month. Lauzon says that Gemvara’s revenue has doubled every month or two since launching in February, and its sales this holiday season will top what an average jewelry store sells in a year. He expects to close out the year with North of a $10 million run rate.
So what’s changing on the site? Lauzon says the biggest change is coming to the homepage, which is going to increasingly highlight select pieces of jewelry and the emotional stories that are attached to them. That’s a good start but it’s mostly aesthetic — in the future though, the site will offer these highlighted pieces of jewelry in fire sales, where many people buy the same item. Lauzon also had a few interesting facts to share about how the site has grown. Given the site’s customization options, you’d think that most people visit it with the intention of crafting their ideal piece of jewelry. But that’s not exactly true — Lauzon says that while people aren’t keen to be talked into something by their local jeweler, they aren’t necessarily setting out to craft a custom piece, either. Instead, they just want to come across exactly what they’re looking for. It’s a subtle difference, but Gemvara is taking advantage of it. Lauzon says that the site dynamically builds a custom landing page for each of its jewelry permutations. Then, when a user goes to Google and searches for a piece of jewelry that’s very specific, there’s a good chance that Gemvara’s landing page will show up as exactly what they’re looking for. Gemvara originally had a model that included selling jewelry from in-store kiosks at partner jewelers, but it has since abandoned that to go online-only.
       
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| When Steve Jobs Rants, Visualizations Of His Words Materialize Posted: 19 Oct 2010 06:53 AM PDT Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs went on a bit of a tirade against Google, and Android in particular, during the company’s quarterly earnings call yesterday. You can listen to his rant or read the full transcript over on Macworld, but here’s another way to capture what the man said about the competition:
The above is an oft-used picture of Jobs, artfully turned into a word cloud based on his rantings, courtesy of Tagxedo. The latter service is a great way to visualize textual information, in spite of its God awful name. As you can see, Android and Google are mentioned a lot, as are the words ‘app’ and ‘software’. You can also tell Jobs called Apple’s ‘approach’ ‘integrated’ quite a lot (rather than ‘closed’), stressed the importance of ‘developers’ in the ecosystem often and used the word ‘fragmented’ to bash Google and Android the most. Android chief Andy Rubin employed a vastly different strategy to, in true geeky fashion, respond to the rant on Twitter. I’m left hoping Steve Jobs makes more appearances in earnings calls in the future. Bonus: a word cloud based on Jobs’ entire rant:
       
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| HP Drops Palm From webOS’s Branding, Launches HP webOS 2.0 Posted: 19 Oct 2010 06:42 AM PDT
HP just announced the next generation webOS and it’s a doozy. This platform now has all the weapons necessary to fully compete in the smartphone wars: true multitasking, an updated version of the social media connection service Synergy, Adobe Flash 10.1, and a whole bunch of new advancements. Hardware is really the only thing missing now, but that’s set to change as the first webOS device, the Palm Pre 2, will hit later this week in France and in the coming months on Verizon in the states.        
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| Ooyala Launches Video Paywall Powered By PayPal Posted: 19 Oct 2010 06:34 AM PDT
Ooyala, which just raised $22 million in funding, specializes in hosting videos for large corporate and media clients, such as the Telegraph Media Group, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Dell and General Mills. Now clients can turn on a paywall for videos, allowing viewers can use PayPal to pay directly in their browser screen. A number of Ooyala customers, including LATV Networks and Sportfive, are already testing the PayPal-powered paywall. Bismarck Lepe, President of Product at Oooyala, says the experience aims to be similar to paying for videos in the iTunes and the YouTube video store. It doesn’t appear that the company is using PayPal’s new Micropayments product, which is set to launch next week at the payment giant’s developer conference. The new product will include specialized payment support for micropayments for online video, music, games (including the sale of virtual goods and currencies), paid content, books and software. Ooyala’s paywall is integrated directly within the video player. Publishers can set a free preview duration before the paywall appears to give viewers a taste of content, set the price per view, set the rental period and set the number of times a view can watch a video after the payment is made. Publishers can also choose to syndicate content to other sites.        
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| StockTwits Grabs $4 Million More In Inside Round Posted: 19 Oct 2010 06:00 AM PDT
In 2009 they broke off from Twitter, launching their own messaging platform. They acquired a financial news hub early this year, and then launched a private company product as well. Yep, those days as a simple Twitter filter are long behind them. Cofounder and CEO Howard Lindzon tells us the company had another milestone today – a $4 million venture round from existing investors Foundry Group and True Ventures. That brings the total capital raised by the company to $8.6 million. The funds will be used to hire more engineers and develop product more speedily, says Lindzon. And more updates are coming soon.        
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| Brammo’s Newest Electric Motorcycle, The Enertia Plus, Gets 80 Miles Per Charge Posted: 19 Oct 2010 05:59 AM PDT
Set for delivery in 2011, the Enertia Plus comes with a 6.0 kWh Brammo Power Lithium Ion battery pack, and a manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $8,995. According to the company’s chief executive Craig Bramscher, the Enertia Plus is a zero-emissions motorcycle that will travel 80 miles on one charge, over 60 miles per hour, and should take about 6 hours to fully power up at any electric vehicle (EV) charging station with Level 1 capabilities. By contrast, Brammo’s debut machine, the Enertia, went only 40 miles on a single charge and used 3.2 kWh Valence-branded batteries. Asked to compare the environmental impact of the Enertia Plus to that of a popular, current model of a classic motorcycle, Bramscher said “Our ‘wells to wheels’ calculations show an Enertia being 92% more efficient, and that’s assuming the dirtiest electricity in the U.S. — coal generated electricity — was used to charge it.” The company is working on an electric vehicle battery take back and recycling program that Bramscher promised would be in effect by the time the Enertia Plus began to ship to customers in 2011. Earlier this year, Brammo attained $12.5 million as part of a series B round of venture funding. The company is in the process of raising the second tranche of the series B round, targeting $30 million total now. Its financial backers include Alpine Inc., Chrysalix Energy Venture Capital and Best Buy Capital. The Enertia Plus will sell at dealerships, including some Best Buy stores, according to a company press statement. Brammo recently released the Empulse Trio line of electric motorcycles which use the same battery technology as will be featured in the Enertia Plus, and at the high end have a 100 mile per hour top speed, and can travel 100 miles per charge. The Empulse Trio bikes are race bikes, not meant for riding with a passenger. The Enertia Plus can accommodate a passenger.
       
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| Social Commerce Startup LivingSocial Hits 10 Million Subscribers, Buys Urban Escapes Posted: 19 Oct 2010 05:31 AM PDT
Social shopping site LivingSocial this morning announced the acquisition of Urban Escapes, a social adventure company. Urban Escapes offers trips that promote a “fun and active lifestyle and a chance to escape the day-to-day rat race”. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but according to the FAQ in the blog post, Urban Escapes’ entire full-time team has moved to LivingSocial's office in New York in Union Square. Initially, the company says, Urban Escapes staff will work directly with LivingSocial reps in 5 introductory markets designing and creating adventures (e.g. this Snow Tubing & Beer Tasting trip), but will eventually expand to the 95 markets LivingSocial is now live in. Coinciding with the acquisition news, LivingSocial has also disclosed how many subscribers it has attracted to date: 10 million. The Groupon rival has raised just south of $50 million to date, putting it in a position to snap up smaller niche players to grow in other ways than organically and by launching in new cities and countries worldwide.        
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| Notorious Patent Troll NTP Locates A New Target: Yahoo Posted: 19 Oct 2010 05:07 AM PDT
Patent troll extraordinaire NTP Inc. has already sued just about everyone in the mobile industry (famously Research In Motion but also Apple, Google, HTC, LG, Microsoft, Motorola, AT&T, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless) and now appears to have found a new target, one that is already in a corner where punches are being dealt: Yahoo. NTP alleges that Yahoo infringes patents it owns, more specifically covering wireless email technology and radio frequency antenna design. About half of the US patents held by NTP were originally assigned to a company called Telefind, which was partly owned by the late inventor Thomas J. Campana. The company is now out of business, and NTP apparently decided that suing the world for infringement of patents it acquired was a much better business model than actually building something useful. That said, Yahoo better be prepared to defend itself vigorously – five of the patents in-suit were subject of earlier, intensive patent litigation between NTP and RIM. The Blackberry maker settled the lawsuit in March 2006 for a whopping $612.5 million. The complaint is embedded below. Complaint-yahoo        
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| Evernote Raises $20M In Bid To Become A “Global Platform For Human Memory” Posted: 19 Oct 2010 04:57 AM PDT
Memory enhancement service Evernote is loved by many, including, it appears, venture capitalists. This morning, the startup is announcing that it has raised its third institutional round of funding, and it’s a whopper: Sequoia Capital and previous backers are injecting $20 million into the company – that’s on top of the $25.5 million the company raised earlier. Roelof Botha, Partner at Sequoia, will join the Evernote board as an observer. Evernote, which is billed as a service that “helps the world remember everything”, says it has attracted close to 5 million users worldwide in less than two and a half years (up from 4 million mid-August 2010). These users are given the choice of thirteen different desktop, mobile and browser options for capturing things to remember (think meeting notes, wine labels, shopping lists and whatnot). In a statement, Evernote CEO Phil Libin says users can expect “more of everything” now that the funding round is all done and signed, and that the company will explore new markets and opportunities in addition. In a blog post, Libin speaks more candidly about the company’s ambitious growth plans, although he declines to go into too many details about Evernote’s roadmap for the future:
According to the chief executive, Evernote has signed up more than 10,000 new users every day in the past two months, released major new updates to most of our clients, added more than a dozen new partners and increased revenue from Premium subscriptions to the point where it can fund all of the startup’s day-to-day operations. Libin also blogs that Evernote, in time, will grow from a solution that helps you remember everything to the “global platform for human memory” and to become “the trusted, permanent and ubiquitous destination for all of your lifetime memories” – a lofty goal if I’ve ever heard one. Good thing we’re big fans of lofty goals around here. The full list of investors for Evernote’s $20 million Series C round: Sequoia Capital, Morgenthaler Ventures, Troika Dialog and DOCOMO Capital.        
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| EchoSign Adds Social Identities To E-Signatures Posted: 19 Oct 2010 04:45 AM PDT
EchoSign's electronic signature service lets you append digital signatures to contracts and other business documents, store them in digital form, and manage those documents without printing them out and faxing them. Currently, EchoSign has 30,000 enterprise customers using the service, including Dell, BT, Google, Facebook, OpenTable, Groupon, Intuit, Delta, Orange, Aetna, Time Warner Cable, Qualcomm, Citrix, Symantec, and Netsuite. The web identity feature is designed to help provide an easy way to confirm identity in a transaction and help you tie their social graph to you e-signatures. Your social graph is automatically captured by EchoSign and attached to PDF copies of every signed contract, along with your email address, IP address, signature image, and chronological transaction history. While there’s no extra cost to use EchoSign web identity, you can also disable the feature. EchoSign, launched back in 2006, has reached 2.2 million users, up from 1.2 million users earlier this year.        
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| Millennial Media: Android Revenue Exceeds iPhone Ad Sales; iPad Up 316 Percent In Q3 Posted: 19 Oct 2010 03:55 AM PDT
Millennial added a new data point this month: revenue. This month for the first time, Android revenue on the network exceeded iPhone-only revenue on the Millennial network. But iPad revenue growth increased 316% in Q3, with impression growth up by 156% in the same period. In terms of ad requests, Android requests grew 26% month-over-month and are now up 1,238% since January. Apple ad requests increased 10% month-over-month and since January, Apple has increased 18%. The iPad saw the strongest growth, with ad requests rising 63% month-over-month. RIM ad requests increased 16% month-over-month, up by 143% since January. Millennial says that smartphone impression share increased 7% month-over-month and accounted for 58% of the Smartphone, Feature Phone and Connected Device Impression share for September. And connected devices and smartphones totaled approximately 71% of the U.S. Smartphone, Feature Phone & Connected Device Impression Share in September.
With respect to device manufacturers, Apple accounted for 30% share of impressions on the Millennial network in September. Motorola continued its fast growth pattern, jumping ahead of Samsung to become the second largest device manufacturer. RIM and HTC rounded out the mix, taking the fourth and fifth spots, respectively. RIM devices represented five of the Top 20 Mobile Phones, with the BlackBerry Curve maintaining the third position for the second consecutive month. Smartphones accounted for 14 of the Top 20 Mobile phones on Millennial. In terms of specific applications, Games, Social Networking and Music were the Top Three Mobile The most interesting data point out of Millennial’s report is the revenue tallies for Q3. Although iPad ad requests and impressions are growing, Android phones seem to be bringing in more money, at least on Millennial’s network. I’d be curious to see if this trend is reflected on AdMob and other mobile ad networks, or if this is exclusive to Millennial. Millennial itself is now planning to IPO next year, CEO Paul Paulieri told us last month. As competition heats up in the mobile advertising space, with iAd and Google's AdMob all vying for a pice of a $1 billion market, it should be interesting to see how things play out in the space.        
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| Consolidation In Enterprise Messaging Land As Mirapoint And Critical Path Merge Posted: 19 Oct 2010 03:14 AM PDT  Enterprise messaging company Mirapoint and Critical Path, provider of messaging software and services, have entered into a definitive agreement to merge. Combined, both companies' strategies of delivering messaging, security and archiving solutions to corporations and service providers around the world are advanced, is the message Mirapoint and Critical Path are conveying. Under the terms of the merger agreement, the combined company will operate under the name Critical Path with primary operations in Sunnyvale, California and Dublin, Ireland. Mark Palomba will serve as Critical Path CEO with Jeff Witous serving as a strategic advisor to the company.
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| What If Google’s Social Layer Is Chrome? What If Facebook Builds A Browser? Posted: 19 Oct 2010 02:34 AM PDT
I have no direct knowledge that this is about to happen, but recent conversations have me thinking about this. What if say, Google, in their attempt to finally create a cohesive social experience, decided to forgo building yet another service and instead went for the ultimate layer: the browser? They could do this, of course, because they make the Chrome web browser. Just imagine a web experience where you signed in once and that was it. For the rest of the time you used that browser, everything would be set for you — well, provided you used Google services. Notifications, instant messages, status updates — those would all come in and go out through Chrome, not some website you have open within Chrome. That may sound weird, but we’re not that far away from this personalization of the browser. Consider that Chrome’s Omnibox (the URL bar and search box) is already a Google zone. Sure, you can set it to use another search engine, but how many people do you think actually do that? And now that Google Instant is being integrated into it, it seems like the connection will only get stronger. And shortly, Chrome will have its own Web App Store. Some of these apps (the paid variety) will only run in Chrome itself; the payment mechanism and DRM will have to be run through the browser. How will that work? Presumably, you’ll have to be signed in to your Google account when using the browser. Google has already put some of this in place by enticing people to put their credentials in to the browser for things like bookmark sync. And the latest builds of Chromium make it very clear that you’re signed into the browser, not some website. Oh yeah, and there’s this thing called Chrome OS which is due to launch shortly. How do you think that will work? Yep, you’ll be logged in to your Google account the entire time. From what I’ve heard, the basic high-level thought is that Chrome OS and Chrome are the same thing. One is simply going to be an operating system within another operating system (Windows, OS X, or Linux), while the other won’t have that additional layer. But functionality-wise, they’ll be the same. Other attempts have been made at social web browsers — notably, Flock. But Chrome has been smart to slowly integrate personalizations over time. And they have two killer features: Google services and the fastest browser. Now that Chrome is approaching 100 million users, it may be close to the time that Google could strike with a fully social browsing experience.
Undoubtedly such a move would garner backlash, but Google could point people in the direction of Chromium, the open-source browser on which Chrome is based. The truth is that right now, Chromium is little more than a testing ground for Chrome. But what if it truly became the open-source alternative to the Google proprietary browser? Again, none of this sounds that far-fetched to me. “We want people to be more logged in to Google,” CEO Eric Schmidt said last week. Having an always-on presence at the browser level could certainly achieve that. Google would be able to see everything you do on the web. And they would be smart enough to make you opt-in to this. All in the name of serving you better content and a better experience, I’m sure. To see an even more extreme version of this model in action, you only have to look at Android and the iPhone. With each of those platforms, you sign-in not at the browser level, but at the system level. Again, this is all done in the name of ease (which is very real), but it also gives both Google and Apple access to a huge amount of data about you. And if you think the web isn’t going to move that way, you’re dreaming. Even if it isn’t Google that pulls off the ultimate connected web browser, rival Facebook just might. They haven’t given any indication that they want to be in the actual browser space, but Google didn’t either before they dropped Chrome in our laps. And Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made a lot of comments recently suggesting that there needs to be a better way for users to sign-in once on systems and forget about it. Facebook Connect is sort of that. But it doesn’t go deep enough, and Zuckerberg knows it. That’s why the notion of a Facebook Phone isn’t so crazy. It would require years of work, but just look at what Google and Apple are doing now. A Facebook browser would be a shorter-term solution to some of what Facebook undoubtedly wants to do. You might laugh at the notion of a Facebook web browser, but be honest: how many of your friends would use it? Probably a lot. If it had chat, alerts, and, of course, the News Feed, it would be a huge hit. You could visit any site on the web, but you’d be already logged in to your Facebook account. And you’d have one-click access to all your Facebook credits to buy whatever you wanted. And you would already be logged in to comment anywhere. And it would be huge for sharing. Huge. The more I think about this, the more I think it would be crazy for Facebook not to do this. Because Google is going to. And Google and Apple already have a huge head start on this type of deep integration thanks to their mobile platforms. Facebook is in the middle of a race they haven’t even started running yet. Again, I have no concrete evidence on any of this, but I have this feeling that web browsing as we know it is about to change. For users, such a shift would be a combination of good and bad. But for the web powers that be, it would be all good. And that’s why it will happen.
       
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| Android Chief Andy Rubin Sends His First Tweet — And It’s Aimed At Steve Jobs Posted: 19 Oct 2010 12:03 AM PDT
Well would you look at that. Earlier today, Apple CEO Steve Jobs went on a bit of a tirade against Google and Android in particular. And you know that couldn’t have made Android chief Andy Rubin too happy. But how was he going to respond? Well, he decided to awaken his dormant Twitter account and send his first tweet tonight. And sure enough, it’s clearly (but subtly) in response to Jobs. Without further ado, here is Andy Rubin’s first tweet:
For those keeping score at home, that’s Rubin using some geeked-out lingo to explain exactly what open is to Steve Jobs. In other words: Android. Well played. Rubin has about 100 followers right now. That should skyrocket shortly. Welcome to Twitter, Andy! I wouldn’t expect a response from Jobs, as he doesn’t use the service. But maybe Apple SVP Scott Forstall will respond instead (he has yet to tweet and still only follows Conan)? Earlier, I didn’t have a way to verify for certain if it was Rubin or not, so I had some qualified words just in case it wasn’t. I’ve since confirmed with a couple of people in the know that it is in fact him, so I’ve updated the wording. [thanks Jon]        
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| Y Connect, Yet Another Doomed “Me Too” Service From Yahoo Posted: 19 Oct 2010 12:00 AM PDT
The way the WSJ vaguely describes it, Y Connect enables your login activity on Yahoo sites to be easily shared with your contacts on Yahoo. But how many contacts do you have on Yahoo? The last time I visited a Yahoo site was when the service went down last Friday, and that was only to check if it actually was down. But aside from ignoring my website snobbery, the most horrendous crime Yahoo commits here is that it makes the same fatal mistake as Google Buzz, i.e. confusing people you email with people within your social graph. It gets better; If you uncharacteristically visit a non-Y Connect site, your activity will be somehow routed through Yahoo Pulse — I’m guessing through a Y Like button based on the pattern. For those of you unfamiliar with Yahoo Pulse, its’s like a downmarket Google Buzz, which is like a downmarket Twitter. You get where I’m going with this (if not, see title)? While Yahoo does have scale, and the Yahoo homepage does bring in a lot of especially foreign traffic (the site itself brought in 177.5 million unique Comscore visits in September versus Facebook’s 148.4 million) its growth (9.5% year over year) is nowhere near Facebook’s at 55.4 % and its demographic is only getting older.
And while Yahoo Mail is still the largest email provider in the world at 94.6 million unique Comscore visits this September, that number has been steadily waning, especially among younger Internet users when compared to Gmail. This is coupled with the fact that no publishers I have spoken with have been approached by Yahoo regarding possible Y Connect integration, and one actually flat out said that he would say no to Yahoo if it did come calling. According to an email sent to TechCrunch, one media company is holding off on Y Connect integration because it afraid that it will damage its existing relationship with Facebook, despite the guaranteed Yahoo traffic and ad unit discounts. As far I can tell from reports, the also derivative Huffington Post is currently the only confirmed Y Connect partner for its fall launch. So much of the battle online is won or lost on hype, and currently both Facebook and Google are not only beating Yahoo in coolness but also in stickiness i.e. time spent on site. My advice? Instead of having Y Connect go the way of Yahoo MyWeb, Buzz, Mash, 360 and the myriad other copycat Yahoo innovations that have failed, Yahoo should pull a Google Robocar and actually dump its cash into something innovative, for a change.        
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| Twitter’s Snowflake Project To Update Tweet IDs Really Is More Like A Blizzard Now Posted: 18 Oct 2010 09:01 PM PDT
A post today by developer advocate Matt Harris in the Twitter Development Talk Google Group outlines what is going on. It’s a bit technical, and if you’re a developer, you should obviously read the whole thing. It boils down to this: some programming languages, notably JavaScript, cannot support numbers with more than 53 bits. That’s a problem since Snowflake is going to create tweet IDs that are 64 bit unsigned integers. Writes Harris:
So, if you have developed your Twitter app using JavaScript, you need to update your code to read this string version of the tweet ID instead of the integer version. In other words, a lot of developers are likely going to have to alter their code to keep things kosher. Luckily, you have some more time. Harris notes that this coming Friday (October 22), they will start placing string versions of tweet IDs in the API. On November 4, the plan is then to activate Snowflake, but limit tweet IDs to 41 bits. But on November 26, these IDs will go longer than 53 bits, so you’ll need to have your updated code in place by then. It’s sort of like a mini Twitpocalypse of sorts. Or maybe a Twlizzard? Third-party Twitter developers: be sure to check your code. [photo: flickr/sarah ackerman] [thanks Alex]        
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| Apple And Google: The Activation Pissing Match Continues Posted: 18 Oct 2010 06:53 PM PDT
According to Jobs, Apple is now activating 275,000 iOS devices a day. That stat is for the previous 30 days. He also noted that some days, they’re getting close to 300,000. Impressive, for sure. But why drop such a number? Because Google did first, of course. Let’s recap. In May, at Google I/O, Google announced it was activating 100,000 Android units a day. By June, that number had jumped to 160,000. And in August, CEO Eric Schmidt announced Android activations were up to 200,000 units a day. The subtle implications of each of these numbers was that Android was growing so fast that it was leaving Apple in the dust. Obviously, Jobs didn’t like that too much. So in September, Jobs used his time on stage at an Apple event to announce that Apple was actually activating 230,000 iOS devices a day. Further, he called into question whether Google was counting upgrades in their numbers. “We think some of our friends are counting upgrades in their numbers,” Jobs said. Within hours, Google responded: “The Android activation numbers do not include upgrades and are, in fact, only a portion of the Android devices in the market since we only include devices that have Google services.” At the time, I joked that it would probably take a day for Google to announce they were now activating 250,000 units a day. Turns out it took about 30 days. In an interview with Newsweek, Android chief Andy Rubin noted that some days Android activations do surpass 250,000. And so today we have Jobs one-upping that with the 270,000 number — topped with the 300,000 number on some days. It’s worth noting that Apple is very deliberate in announcing their numbers in terms of “iOS devices” and not just “iPhones”. Apple has never clarified this, but you have to assume they mean all iOS devices — meaning iPads and iPod touches as well. Press conference from Google announcing 301,000 Android activations a day in 5, 4, 3, 2… [photo: flickr/tony hue]        
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| Video Calling Startup Wham! Nails $3 Million In Series A Posted: 18 Oct 2010 05:50 PM PDT High-definition video calling startup Wham! announced today a $3 million dollar Series A investment lead by Santa Monica’s Palomar Ventures. While Wham! representatives have still not responded to my calls about what exactly their as-of-yet-un-launched Vuu product is (the press release says “product undisclosed”), I’m assuming it’s some kind of consumer-focused, video-call-optimized phone — based on the WhamInc.com website images and copy. Founded by Matthew Shoemake, Wham! will be using the new financing to accelerate its product launch in 2011, pouring the money into marketing and software engineering. Whatever the final Wham! “revolutionary video product with a friends and family value proposition” is, it faces stiff competition from Apple’s Facetime and web-based services like Skype and TokBox, which already make video calling from home as simple and inexpensive as possible. Wham! has $4.5 million in funding to date from seed investors, the Texas Emerging Technology Fund, the North Texas Angel Network and Palomar Ventures.
       
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Fox Sports Interactive Media has just announced that it has acquired 
When Facebook launched Places, their entry into the location space, the headlines made it seem as if every startup player in the field was about to go extinct. Obviously, that didn’t happen. Instead, the playing field has largely stayed the same — though slowly, but surely, those startups are now integrating with Facebook Places in order to get access to Facebook’s massive social graph. The latest is 
Today at an event in San Francisco, Microsoft’s Office division is unveiling a new product: a suite of the company’s productivity services called Office 365.
See ya later, Palm webOS. Hello, HP webOS 2.0! My you look nice.
What was once a service that simply filtered public company stock related tweets out for traders, 
The Oregon based
Mobile ad network 
The top 4 connected devices in Q3 were the iPod Touch, iPad, Sony PSP and the Playstation 3. Feature Phones experienced the largest decrease of 4% month-over-month and had a 29% impression share on Millennial’s network. 
The Wall Street Journal 
Last week, we noted that Twitter was 
Just in case it wasn’t clear enough, 
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